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AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

03-05-2009, 01:00 AM

Phoronix: AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver.

Comment

This absolutely blows. My X1950XTX still does not work properly under Linux, I can't get a multimonitor setup going the way I need under Linux. I also have a X2400 series card for another monitor so what does that mean - now only one monitor will work with the official driver which is connected to the newer but weaker card while the rest are now dead !

On top of that my laptop also has a X1700 which is less than two years old. Are you saying it looses support too? Less than two years. I am furious. So what, when Winblow$ 7 comes along, it won't have drivers for it as well? I can't stand Vista but XP doesn't render text & GUI correctly on my internal screen (high dpi).

Just great, both Winblow$ and Linux won't have official support for my two main video cards.

I had enough of AMD/ATI dragging their feet. I was thrilled when AMD decided to open up the card specs and therefore continued to support them, but the mediocre driver that I had to put up with for the last 2 years and now this is the breaking point. If I could go back, I would buy NVidia all the way as I should have.

Comment

well, it looks to me that fglrx development team is losing momentum - they want to focus on a smaller range of cards in order to keep up.

I was referring to the no extra-effort put into the opensource driver as said on the news.

Will this move generate greater benefits within the open-source ATI stack? It does not appear AMD will be ramping up on their open-source efforts. In fact, just this week the RadeonHD driver took a serious blow as one of the three Novell developers that were responsible for its development was laid off. The remaining developers are also facing shorter work hours.

Comment

In all fairness to AMD, it was a Novell developer that was laid off. That's hardly something you can blame AMD for. But yes times are though all around so if the open source drivers are to survive it may need to become more community, less paid employees. I may be mistaken but I haven't got the impression there's hordes of willing driver developers that have gathered since AMD opened up the specs...